Productive fieldwork trip for Carmel O'Shannesy

As she has done for many years, Carmel O'Shanessy spent the summer in Warlpiri communities in the Australian Northern Territory. This year, Carmel started out her visit by participating in the Warlpiri Triangle workshop, in which Warlpiri teachers develop their curricular and pedagogical skills. Carmel then spent seven weeks in Lajamanu, the community in which she has been working for over a decade on the documentation of Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. During this visit, she collected a range of data as part of her NSF-funded project (on which we had previously reported here). Carmel is compiling a longitudinal corpus of both Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri, and collected cross-sectional production data in both languages from 37 children at three age levels, as well as from 11 young adults. Carmel also collected data for a project (in collaboration with Rikke Bundgaard-Nielsen and Brett Baker from the University of Melbourne) on the perception of obstruents in Warlpiri and Light Warlpiri. A highlight this year was that a recent UM Linguistic major, Gabrielle (Belle) Valentic, accompanied Carmel on her trip to Lajamanu. Belle is one of several undergraduate students who have worked with Carmel on Warlpiri data at UM, and while in the community Belle was able to meet some of the speakers whose recordings she had been listening to in Ann Arbor.